People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD)
내무인민위원부(NKVD)
The all-union People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs of the USSR, created on 10 July 1934 by absorbing the Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU). It combined the political police, the ordinary police, border and internal troops and the camp system, carried out the Great Purge of 1937–1938 and mass deportations, and was renamed the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) in 1946.
In depth
An RSFSR People's Commissariat of the same name, set up right after the October Revolution of 1917, ran the militia and supervised local soviets until it was abolished on 15 December 1930. The all-union NKVD of 1934 took in the OGPU as its Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB) and inherited the Gulag. It was headed in turn by Genrikh Yagoda (1934–1936), Nikolai Yezhov (1936–1938) and Lavrentiy Beria (1938–1945); its state-security arm was split off as the NKGB in February 1941, merged back in July, and separated again in April 1943.
In the Great Purge under Yezhov the NKVD carried out Order No. 00447 and the national operations: in 1937 and 1938 alone at least 1.3 million people were arrested and 681,692 shot, with sentences passed by extrajudicial bodies such as the troikas. The NKVD also deported the Koreans of the Soviet Far East in 1937, killed some 22,000 Polish prisoners at Katyn and elsewhere in 1940, and carried out the deportations from the Baltic states in 1940–1941 and of whole peoples such as the Chechens, Ingush and Crimean Tatars in 1944. When all People's Commissariats became ministries in March 1946, the NKVD became the MVD and the NKGB the MGB.